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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Builds for Patch 3.0.2 - Mailbag

Update: I ended up going with something a little different then I listed below. I was kind of bummed when EnM and Moonfury hadn't been reduced yet because I still wanted to try out Owlkin Frenzy and some of the other talents. So I went with this build instead.

As you probably know, Patch 3.0.2 is dropping today, and with it a lot of changes to the Balance tree. These changed have prompted a lot of debate and questions like this one I received today:

Hi Gray

Tonight we'll start to play on 3.0.2 with a cleared talent tree. I've found a lot of build ready for WOTLK but with all 71 points spent.I need a build for a level 70, to start playing on the patch without headaches.

Have you any suggestions?

Thank you very much.

M.B.

I think this question is on a lot of people's minds right now. It's a little hard to say right now because I don't know if the changes to Moonfury and Earth and Moon have taken affect in the patch but I will look at it both ways.

If Moonfury and Earth and Moon have there costs reduced in the patch then you can pick up all of the important talents and have a couple to play with. I have bypassed Intensity, Omen of Clarity and Master Shapeshifter because I'm told that Mana hasn't been a big issue for moonkin on the PTR and putting 16 points in that tree would force us to skip some good talents in the Balance Tree.

The Core Build Picks up all of the major talents in my opinion. In My Build I have also picked up Dreamstate, Owlkin Frenzy, and Starfall. I picked up Dreamstate, because I'm having a hard time trusting that I won't have mana issues without all the mana regen talents. I'm picking this one up to ease my mind a little. Starfall I picked up to play with. It sounds like a cool ability and I want to try it out before the expansion. I picked up Owlkin Frenzy because by guild plans on raiding up until the expansion is released. We are currently working on SWP and clearing BT weekly. Both instances have lots of raid wide damage that could make Owlkin frenzy valuable.

You might also consider Gale Winds all of the trash if your guild is still progressing through Hyjal. Force of Nature is always a fun talent for soloing and some raid bosses. You could also put a point into Eclipse if you don't have the 4T5 or 4T6 set bonuses.

For those of you that don't plan on seriously raiding for the next month this is the build I would choose. I build this spec purely to play around with some of the new talents. It should allow you to do well in PvP, 5-mans, and raids that you over gear.

M.B. thanks for the question.

What builds are you guy's planning on using? What do you think of the builds I have suggested?

16 comments:

Siobhann
said...

Thanks for sharing your builds.

I'm going to try this. http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=0xG0hiIoIdhc0RhZbxhhSubtlety will let me pop out and heal. Going OOM makes me a very sad panda so I'm taking all the mana regen talents. If I have enough mana, I'll drop dreamstate and pick up IIS.

I'm going to try an extension of the core moonfury raid build you proposed. http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=0xGbhicsAdhV0opZbx The main change I'm making to that is allocating the points from Celestial Focus into Dreamstate and picking up Improved Mark. I strongly dislike stun procs; they can't stun bosses and in my experience have horrible timing and little effect on trash. The 3% haste rating is tempting, but I think I will wait a while to pick it up. I'm also one of two raiding druids in my guild, so imp. mark is important for me to have.

I've been reading Gray Matter for a while - ever since I was looking for kara gear.The Kara posts was really useful and informative, as with all your posts.

But have you considered making an abstract when you create those huge math-heavy posts?I appreciate you are doing all this - but I get lost in those posts.You have my 'stamp-of-approval'- you know better than I, and therefore if you say so, so be it. In case you should be wrong, it is not going to make an useless Moonkin out of me, since this is dealing with the last few per cent of performance.

I really want to stretch that I have learned loads from your blog, and will keep reading anyway.

If your worried about mana regen that that isn't a bad build. However I would pick up Natural Shapeshifter instead of Subtlety unless you PvP a lot. Your healing threat should be enough to pull aggro so you could use the talents to save mana when you have to shift to heal.

@Erdluf

EnM is definately a very important talent for anyone that needs to seriously DPS. I dropped it from my "fun" build because it is a stright forward DPS increase, and I created the build to play with some of the new talents. I don't suggest that anyone drop it from a serious leveling, raiding, or pvp build.

Very good points as always.

@HunahpuI never had a big problem with stuns, but the 3% haste is a big DPS increase if you have the mana for it. As far as Imp MotW goes, I wouldn't worry about it. If our raid has to go with normal GotW it's not a big loss. If your other druid is a resto then it is no loss at all. Just give them some reagents before raid.

@Staggerlee

I realize that my theorycrafting posts get long and bogged down in details. The problem is if I don't go into detail then peole don't believe it if they have a different opinion.

I don't do an abstract but I do try and sum things up in a conclusion. If your not really interested in the math please feel free to skip to the end. Hope this helps.

@Anonymous and everyone else.

Thank you for all the kind words. What I'm doing isnt all that special. Mostly what I do is verify what other people say, and write it down in a single location for people to access. There are plenty of times when someone else has corrected my mistakes or presented a new idea.

I am extremely happy that you find my site helpful, but I cannot take all of the credit. The community as a whole has taught me a ton, and if it wasn't for the people on the WoW Forums, EJ Forums, and Moonkin Repository this site wouldn't be have of what it is.

I think I may actually cash in my unused T6 tokens, honor and arena points, and convert some of my unused Resto gear into damage gear and try being a boomkin for awhile (CRAZY, I KNOW). And by awhile, I mean until I remember that I'm not as enthused about casting and go back to being Feral. This is what I'm looking at to play around with:

I'll definitely keep that in mind RE: Faerie Fire, but as of right now, our Shadow Priest is rerolling Warlock for the xpac. I think we're going to blow through Karazhan tonight just to see how fast we can do it, and depending on how many tanks we have online, I might try it (teh boomkin) out.

As for the tokens, it was one of those things where we literally had Vanquisher drop every goddamn week, and finally, after a certain point, the Druids were the only ones who could even pick them up for offspec anymore. I'm pretty sure all the dr00ds in Sing had a reasonably complete Resto, Feral and Balance set.

Kara is going to be a joke. We cleared BT last night in just 2.5 hours, and that included a server crash in the middle that kept us down for at least 20 minutes. It was insane. If you really push it, I'm sure you can clear kara in under an hour with no problem.

As to your question, A main hand / off hand combo is almost always better. There are only two good DPS staff's in the game right now, and they are the Illidan staff and the sunwell staff.

In your case the Punisher is a very good weapon. The off hand isn't horrible but as you know where are better things out there. The Mp5 is almost useless. Last night in BT I had no issues with mana and I only had 112 incombat Mp5.

If you have badges laying around you may want to pick up the Haste off hand. I can't remember its name right now, but if you armory me you can see it.

Good call. The Voodoo Shaker, maybe? I'll go look it up. It's been interesting looking at some pieces of my old Resto gear and noticing that they're suddenly slightly more valuable as damage pieces now (especially the off-pieces from BT with Haste on them that I initially yawned at).

We did Kara/ZA last night back to back in under 2 hours, and that included doing loot and waiting around to summon people and all that hoop-de-doo. It's too easy. We just steamroll through things practically by button mashing and AOEing. I'm holding my breath and waiting to be nerfed, because I ended up 4th on damage tanking. I almost wish I were still in Sunwell so we could all line up and sneeze and watch the bosses fall over.

I was actually thinking of Fetish of the Primal Gods. it has more damage and Haste, at the cost of some base stats.

Are re you saying you did Kara and ZA back to back in under 2 hours? If so that is amazing.

We ran SWP last night. We had been working on Kalagos for a while and were consistently getting him to 50% with our best attempts around 30%. Last night we one shotted him for the guild first. We then went to Brutalis and 2 shotted him for a guild first.

We tried Felmyst a couple of times and it is clear that the patch didn't make all of the bosses cake walks. We still have to learn all off the coordination stuff. It does give me hope that we might be able to clear SWP before the expansion if we can learn a boss a week.

My main reason for taking Furor over E&M was that really all the build was intended to do was AoE so the debuff would never be applied and then it came down to 5% spell dmg vs 10% intellect. I went with the intellect since it increases spell dmg by around 1.2% and also crit and mana restore from crits since it % of your max mana. Also allows for less down time between pulls or just more mana to push out the last bit. Really the build is intended for having fun in lower instances and what not more so then a serious build. The build could also be used for Panzerkin tanking and the higher mana pool would help with that more then the 5% dmg